


Plan B(omb)

by azarias



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Team Hot Dads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:47:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azarias/pseuds/azarias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Herc and Stacker are gonna need a bigger <s>boat</s> <s>robot</s> nuke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Plan B(omb)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Brenda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brenda/gifts).



> In honor of this holiday season, I give you the gift of Hot Dads fluff. May it warm your heart or give you something nice to read on the beach, depending on your hemisphere.

Herc sprawled over an armchair, barefoot in his uniform slacks and an undershirt, drinking a Coke and contemplating mortality. Relevant topic. The Powers That Be had just declared him a dinosaur -- him and the rest of the Jaeger program, too.  And there was one almighty meteor with all their names on it, getting ready on the other side of a hole in the Pacific. Orders were to hide their heads and wish it away.

He’d stood in Anchorage’s mothballed LOCCENT today and watched those orders given, and it turned out that somewhere along the line Herc Hansen had become a man with self-control because he hadn’t thrown a screaming fit right then and there. He’d kept his mouth shut and let Stacker do the talking, and if the PPDC councilors had been there, yeah, he’d’ve tried to strangle one of them, but they weren’t and he hadn’t. Years back, he’d’ve walked up and put his fist through the screen.

People got the idea sometimes his son had been hatched from an egg, full-grown and an arsehole already. God forbid a single dad could maybe influence his kid a little. Chuck’s temper was nothing Herc didn’t know already from years of practice with his own.  He was going to try to remember that the next time the boy started mouthing off, which was the same as saying the next time Herc would see him.

Forty-five was a hell of a time to realize you’d grown up. Kinda young to die, too, but maybe he could squeeze out another year. He’d lived a decade longer than he’d had any right to already, so that was all right. Problem was it was looking less and less like he was going to be leaving a living world behind.

The shower shut off, and a minute later Stacker walked out of the bathroom, toweling off. It was Stacker’s rooms in the Shatterdome that Herc had been staying in and Stacker’s armchair that Herc had taken over, but Herc had brought the Coke. He reached over to the low table beside him and nudged the other bottle toward Stacker pointedly. Could wish it was something other than a soft drink, but alcohol and Stacker didn’t get along these days, and Herc, well, Herc had spent a lot of time wishing for a drink lately. Best not to go down that path again.

“Come up with anything?” Herc asked.

Stacker was one of the great bathroom thinkers of world. Something about it organized his mind, the way kilometer eleven of a ten klick run did Herc’s. He was halfway used to Stacker coming out with something brilliant after a few minutes on the loo.

Stacker paused in toweling off, then shrugged. "Yeah. I think I'm going get us all killed." He popped the top off the Coke while Herc enjoyed the view. He wasn’t dry yet; water glistened on his dark skin and pale, raised circuit-suit scars, and it beaded in his pubic hair like an oasis in the fucking desert.  An old pervert could get used to sleeping with the boss. Point of fact, Herc had.

He’d said that like it worried him, though, so Herc said, "Gonna die anyway, mate. Sooner rather than later if we act like those walls are gonna save us."

"No, I'm serious. I've got a plan. I don't think it's survivable, but god help me, I've got a plan."

"All right. I'm with you."

Stacker dropped the towel and sat down cross-legged on top of it. View was still great. "We keep fighting them as they come at us, we lose. That simple. We need to go after them. I want to take out the Breach."

"Stacks, we've tried that." Them, the US Third Fleet, and every submarine in the People’s Liberation Army Navy – twice. The second time, a Category Four named Jiangshi had risen out of the fire in the middle of the assault, roaring and hungry. Better than thirty thousand sailors died before they’d lured it back to the Marianas where Striker Eureka and four other Jaegers had hunted it among the islands and dying coral mounds.

Stacker looked determined, no less than he had that morning when he’d turned his back on the councilors who had surrendered the fight. "So we try it one more time. What's the first rule of ordnance?"

"If your bomb didn't do it, use a bigger bomb.” Herc shook his head, and because he was getting tired of not touching Stacker he reached out and prodded Stacker’s knee with his toes, friendly and affectionately annoying. “We're already into big fucking bomb territory. Supposing you can get a bigger one – usual supply chains are out, Auntie PPDC isn’t in the mood to give us birthday prezzies this year, I don’t think. How are we going to deliver it that we haven't tried before? Walk up and tip it in?"

"Yeah. Now that you mention it." Stacker took a long swallow of his drink but his eyes didn’t leave Herc’s face.

There really _wasn’t_ any way to respond to that, other than perfect calm or hysterics, and Herc didn’t feel like hysteria right now. It’d put his chances of getting laid in the next hour into the red.

 “What do you think?” Stacker asked.

“I think we’ve got a hell of a lot of planning to do before this is more than a fantasy.” He sighed and rubbed his face and decided on honesty. "I _want_ to make you promise my boy won't be in it."

"I heard a _but_ there.”

"But I'm going to be locking that thought down tight, because he’d blow me out of the conn-pod if he ever knew I had it.”

This had been a purely political run to shut down the Alaska ‘dome and plead their case again to the council; with the officer corps pared down to the bone, Herc got that kind of duty, and besides, he hadn’t wanted Stacker to have to shutter the place alone. Chuck had stayed behind in Sydney, stalking around the Shatterdome when he wasn’t head and shoulders deep in Striker’s targeting control. Herc hadn’t brought the Jaeger with him to Alaska, so it hardly mattered if he and his copilot were on opposite sides of the world, and besides, time apart was good for them. Chuck had been tinkering with that system for a year or better, shaving milliseconds off its acquisition time and swapping notes with Stacker’s Mako as she put together a fighting machine from the derelict of Gipsy Danger. Herc was pretty sure that was the only speaking terms Chuck and Mako were on these days, technical jargon forcing them to stay civil.

He wondered, sometimes, if his kid and Stacker’s thought of the Jaegers more as family than as weapons. Striker had never been too busy for Chuck to spend time with, which was more than Herc could say for himself. Stacker wasn’t any better, sometimes, but Mako thought of Stacker as the man who’d saved her life, not the one who’d let her mother die. That was another place where Chuck found Herc lacking.

Stacker sat his drink aside and grabbed Herc’s foot with hands still cold from the bottle. Herc bit his lip but it turned out Stacker wasn’t feeling vengeful; he started massaging at the base of Herc’s toes, not tickling. Fucking big tough Ranger hero, Herc was, and you could get him on the floor giggling and screaming mercy if you touched his feet right, or the back of his knees. He relaxed, let Stacker manhandle him however Stacker liked.

Thinking, since that seemed the order of the day, he asked, “You remember back before the war, early 2000s, like, when the Yanks were setting half of Asia on fire and convincing the rest of us to join in?”

“Mm,” Stacker said, which was all the commentary it deserved. Of course he remembered.

“I was twenty-one,” Herc said, “a couple of months away from finishing at uni and taking my commission when all that started. I thought Angie was going murder me when I wouldn’t change my mind.”

She _had_ given him her ring back, told him that she wasn’t going to marry a man with a death wish. She’d been all right with the idea of being a military wife before there’d been a war for him to fight; in the face of it she’d been so afraid for him that it had made her furious, which was Angie’s temper through and through. They’d worked it out. A year later she’d climbed into his window one night and told him she was sorry. It’d been a moot point after all; he’d never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan nor any other sandbox, and when Kaiju came and brought him into the war, Angie wasn’t there anymore to be angry with him.

He wished to God she’d been there to yell at him for it.

“I was seventeen,” Stacker said. He tapped Herc’s ankle and Herc unslung his leg from the arm of the chair and put his other foot in Stacker’s lap for a rub. “And my sister was already in, flyin’ them flash planes  …” He grinned. “Surrounded by all those good looking men and women. So I didn’t see any reason to change my mind.  I was immortal anyway, you know, so there wasn’t much I figured could happen.”

“About what I thought,” Herc said with a laugh. “Both of us too dumb to come up with a backup plan.” He shook his head and leaned back, just enjoyed Stacker’s big, warm hands on him. After a while, he said, “Our kids are pretty smart, though.”

“Yeah,” Stacker agreed softly. “Yeah, they are.”

There was something a little wistful, a little worried about how he said it. Herc looked at him, trying to judge his mood. It was hell having a kid you wanted to protect, when they were big enough and bright enough to stop you every time you tried. Chuck had fought against it since the day his mother died, and when Striker needed a second pilot and all the tests said _this one_ Herc had given ground he knew he could never regain. Mako hadn’t won her fight yet, but the day was coming. Soon, the way things were going.

Well. One way to take their mind off of it, and anyway, Stacker was naked and Herc had been sitting here _patiently._ He poked Stacker in the chest with his big toe. “We’re going to shag now, right?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” Stacker agreed, and dragged him out of the chair. 


End file.
